Total Body Plan: The Ultimate Guide to Building Muscle and Losing Fat

I'll soon turn 50 and am relatively new to workouts. I find this book helps me grasp some of the basics. It's a good book for someone who hasn't spent a lifetime at the gym and doesn't understand the terms, proper form or even have a basic program. I liked it.

The book has plenty of colored photographs printed in glossy and high quality paper that entails the start and the end of each weight training exercise. Each photo is described by labeled captions in three to five lines of text. That simple and lucid illustrative format facilitates using the book to execute exercises in practical gym environment. Though, the book lacks descriptive details on the execution steps between the start and end of each exercise yet it affords the reader lengthy assortments of resistance training options. My first negative impressions arose from the poor form of the person photographed executing all the exercises in the book. The overhead squat that starts the warm up phase conveys the sense that the exerciser was poorly coached on performing the exercises. He has poorly aligned arms and loosely elevated shoulders. That sense of poor coaching dominates the posture of the same exerciser in the entire book. Furthermore, the photographed exerciser in the book is a mature adult performing haphazard choices of exercises without clearly defined goal that could save time and reduce anxiety of exercising endlessly. I got a feeling that the book author has hired the photographed exercisers and got him to use all the machines in the gym then dumped the whole mess in a printed book with the least consideration to the reader's objective outcome. The positive side of the book lies in the inclusion of the exercises that emphasize whole body work. Those entail jump squat, drop squat, dynamic push up, and extensive dumbbells exercises. That is besides relying extensively on quality color print that might alleviate the reader's frustration with the lack of purpose in performing endless labor in order to accomplish vague outcome. Mohamed F. El-Hewie Author of Essentials of Weightlifting and Strength Training

Learn the principles of effective training, and then study the science behind them. By understanding your routines, you'll get more out of them.

The Authors do an amazing job of explaining the routines and the science behind them. This book is for everyone who is interested in seeing results from their workouts and breaking out of their counter productive exercise routines. In short this book is an exercise plateau buster. Highlights: - Covers the science and principles of effective training (Written in laymen's terms so that anyone can understand the benefit of correctly training the body's energy systems.) - 6 week maximum muscle workout, including diet plan - 6 week full-scale fat-loss phase, including diet plan - Plus, chest and arm specialization This book will more then get you started; it takes the guess workout out of creating a routine that works, plus provides a solid plan from workouts to diet and is also a very interesting read.